Monday, August 22, 2011

A new children's book, Maggie Goes On a Diet, is making headlines. It is about a chubby girl who stands in front of the mirror holding up a too-small pink dress and sees a different version of herself. Her mirror image is, of course....thin. "This book is about a 14 year old girl who goes on a diet and is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image." - Amazon description

Is the only way to be better, to be skinny? Are young girls supposed to be taught that being chubby is an awful thing? If it is unhealthy, yes of course, but this book is just preposterous!

Friday, August 12, 2011

Some shocking pictures taken by the brilliant photographer, Ed Ou. He photographed women in New York using drugs, mostly shooting up heroin. He also shows the other effects of drug addiction, such as homelessness.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Ed Ou is a Taiwanese Canadian photographer. Here is a very moving and disturbing reportage he did, called: UNDER A NUCLEAR CLOUD

SEMEY, KAZAKHSTAN, NOVEMBER 24 Nurse Larissa Soboleva holds two-year-old Adil Zhilyaev in an orphanage in Semey, Kazakhstan Nov. 24, 2008. Adil was born blind and afflicted with Infantile Cereberal Paralysis (ICP) and hydrocephalia, as a result of his mothers exposure to radiation during years of Soviet weapons testing during the Cold War. He was abandoned by his parents, and is now cared for in an orphanage.

"During the Cold War the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Polygon covering 18,500 square kilometers on the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, was the site of a secret Soviet nuclear testing programme. Through four decades, the Soviet Union test detonated over four hundred nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and underground in preparation for a nuclear war that never took place.

The locals were used as guinea pigs to test the effects of radiation on human populations. Villagers living close by were given no protection or warning of the dangers of radiation. The Soviet military prohibited doctors from attributing the sharp rise in illnesses and deaths from cancer, leukemia, and radiation exposure in the region to the nuclear tests.

Today, only the frenetic chirp of a Geiger counter warns us of the invisible radiation that makes this nuclear wasteland so dangerous that scientists hesitate to spend any amount of time there. Yet, almost two million villagers spend their entire lives in and around the affected area, roughly the size of Italy - drinking ground water, growing crops, and grazing their livestock off the highly irradiated land.

Radiation has silently devastated three generations of people in Kazakhstan, creating health problems ranging from thyroid diseases, cancer, birth defects, deformities, premature aging, and cardiovascular diseases. Life expectancy in the area is seven years less then the national average of Kazakhstan. Suicides are common. Even though nuclear testing ended twenty years ago, these conditions and genetic mutations are passed down for generations to come. " (Ed Ou)